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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lucretius who wrote (16491)	9/6/2000 11:14:16 PM
From: Dalin	Respond to of 436258

Well, where is this dang melt anyhow? I'm gettin impatient..... :0) D.

To: Lucretius who wrote (16491)	9/7/2000 12:42:54 AM
From: IceShark	Respond to of 436258

Does make you wonder. At least I have real skills that can be put to use. Would you like a backstrap - pretty good one off a vegan. -g-

To: Lucretius who wrote (16491)	9/7/2000 7:44:22 AM
From: AllansAlias	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Today is an important test. I have sentiment indications that tell me this will reverse soon and continued strength in old-econ uber-stocks would indicate this as well. I also see too many people expecting a bounce right here. I am neutral to slightly bearish heading to this opening. ____________ Any of you guys read MITA thread? I used to review it a couple of times a week. It has become much more clownish lately, with way too many "ask da cheif" posts. Too bad.

To: Lucretius who wrote (16491)	9/7/2000 8:03:51 AM
From: Giordano Bruno	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

LOL, divining pro-forma earnings... Tech Firms Hide Payroll Taxes On Employees' Stock Options By ROBERT MCGOUGH and MYLENE MANGALINDAN Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Nobody likes paying taxes, but some tech companies apparently like reporting them to their shareholders even less. In their quarterly earnings announcements, businesses such as BEA Systems, Cisco Systems, InfoSpace, Qualcomm and Yahoo! are playing up a net-income figure that ignores the payroll taxes they owe when employees exercise stock options -- as if the taxes had never been incurred. What a concept! In today's stock market, the companies are under heavy pressure to look as profitable as they can. By stressing an earnings figure that excludes the expense of the payroll taxes, they do look more profitable. How are the companies able to do this? Thank Silicon Valley's brilliant innovations in the field of pro-forma earnings. At the top of the earnings releases that technology companies publish, they announce their pro-forma earnings. In the pro-forma number, companies get to include -- or exclude -- just about any revenue or expense that they want. The huge body of accounting rules only applies to the dreary official-income figure that shows up later in the news releases. Inevitably, pro-forma earnings are higher than this "generally accepted accounting principles" number reported lower. Some expenses excluded from pro-forma earnings, such as costs associated with acquisitions, seem reasonable to exclude. They arguably aren't recurring, so their exclusion gives investors a better idea of how the day-to-day business is faring. But payroll taxes? Aren't they a cost of doing business? To be sure, the payroll tax represents only a small portion of income for the companies that exclude it from the pro-forma figure. Still, nowadays, a penny in per-share income can have a big effect on a stock price. And some accounting experts and investors say the disappearing payroll tax is yet another example of the kind of wacky accounting that shows up in pro -forma income. "When you're talking about e-businesses, they all come up with their own cookbook for what the earnings should be," complains Jack Ciesielski, publisher of the Analyst's Accounting Observer, a Baltimore newsletter. "It's kind of ludicrous." Not at all, the companies insist. They argue that leaving out the payroll taxes on options actually makes their business returns clearer to investors. "We're just trying to give people a better idea of our operating results," says Dick Grannis, vice president and treasurer of Qualcomm, a wireless-phone-technology firm. "That's what any pro-forma earnings tries to do."